Environmental historians have been wrestling with central questions of our field for more than four decades now. The authors of the four books being reviewed here address two of them: what exactly is environmentalism, and how would an environmental reading of US history change our understanding of key events? Christopher Sellers and Aaron Sachs analyze social movements based on defense of environmental values and amenities in their search for explanations of the roots of environmentalist thinking, and each also argues that the groups being studied drew their definitions of what was worth preserving from the ways that they used the land. John Wills and Mark Fiege write sweeping analyses of US history with the goal of changing our understanding of the role of the environment in pretty much everything that happens.

To various degrees, all four books would have benefited from addressing explicitly what is unique about the history of the United States. Historians of the American environment should ask whether Americans' attitudes toward and uses of nature are unique to the United States. Are they a product of European settlement of North America or a product of the continent's environment (and hence likely to be similar in Canada)? Or are they the product of industrialization, urbanization, and democratization, and hence might apply in many countries in Europe as well? Or are they the product of a set of government policies that are specific to the United States? Would someone from a very different culture see much difference between New York and Toronto? Minneapolis and Winnipeg? Or Albuquerque and Hermosillo? In our attempts to write about the environmental history of a country that stretches from the Florida Everglades to the Olympic Peninsula, we have frequently thought as if the 49th parallel and the Rio Grande acted as a barrier to ideas and experiences or natural dividing lines, when it should be obvious to environmental historians in particular that these political divisions do not reflect meaningful environmental boundaries. In important ways, the people of Phoenix probably have more in common with residents of Mexico City than with Clevelanders.

That does not mean that it is impossible to write an environmental history of the United States. Rather, most environmental historians would do well to be more precise about the reasons for confining themselves just to the United States, or should write North American environmental history. I expect that most environmental historians would reject the old idea of American exceptionalism, but they often write as if there is something exceptional about the role of nature in American history or about Americans' attitudes to using resources. It is easy to enumerate ways in which Canada and the United States are different, but in the greater scheme of human history they have formed remarkably similar societies with many shared environmental attributes, amenities, and assumptions. Thinking about Canada would be the easiest way to determine what might be American or what might better be called North American – or better yet, what should not be thought of as uniquely American at all.

Mark Fiege has taken on the monumental task of rewriting the US history textbook. He does not actually cover every event in the detail for which a textbook's team of authors would strive, but rather he takes a set of well-known events in US history and reinterprets them in depth. Fiege acknowledges two moments when students bravely challenged professors about the assumptions behind their assignments in environmental-history courses to make the point that most environmental historians have not taken up the implicit premise of our field, that the environment underlies everything and therefore at least sets some constraints on the range of possible outcomes of any debate. Beginning with the supernatural in colonial New England and moving through the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War, railroad building, the atom bomb, and Brown v. Board, with other topics as well, The Republic of Nature is sometimes radical and sometimes just refreshing.

The chapter on Brown v. Board is indicative of his effort to see what is old through new lenses. As it turns out, the terrain of Topeka, Kansas had a great deal to do with the patterns of segregation. In an expected way, African American migrants got the lowlands of the Bottoms that were more prone to flooding, but Fiege also determines that a longer-standing black community had a better spot on higher ground in Tennesseetown. Those two communities took different approaches to the segregation laws facing them, which delayed their ability to cooperate. Just as important to Fiege's retelling is that Linda Brown, the nine-year-old whose name was in the court case's title, had a choice between walking two routes to get to her school bus, each of which had different environmental hazards in the industrial part of her city. Had a nearer school not been reserved for white students, Linda Brown would have had a much less hazardous commute to school.

Republic of Nature ends with an extended set of short essays that feel like embryonic chapters which Fiege considered developing; instead, he casts them as beckoning paths for scholars to follow. Included are such topics as the deadlocked election of 1800, sit-down strikes at GM plants in 1936, and the impact of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963). Some of these topics seemed, somehow, just a bit forced, as if Fiege had skimmed the cream in picking the nine topics that ultimately gained in-depth investigations. In turn, that reminds the reader how difficult Fiege's challenge is to historians – digging into the well-known for an environmental analysis is not for the faint of heart or the skeptic. This is not a book with straightforward heroes and villains, nor does it take a leap to teach its readers a lesson about what policies or practices to adopt. Instead, it reveals motivating forces in the lives of a range of people, many of them quite ordinary. As a whole, it is one of those rare books that every historian of the United States ought to read.

In a much more traditional vein for environmental historians, Christopher Sellers takes on the difficult task of trying to explain the origins of the environmental movement in the United States. With a title that plays off of Kenneth Jackson's well-known Crabgrass Frontier (1987), Sellers focusses on the role of suburban environmentalists in Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America. Sellers examines first the ways in which nature played a role in suburbanization in New York and Los Angeles, reaching back to the previous century's definition of suburbs as the places where nature emerged from the edge of the city. Then Sellers explicitly challenges Adam Rome's take on the origins of environmentalism in The Bulldozer in the Countryside (2001), even as he acknowledges the important work that Rome did in opening up an analysis of the ecological angle of the vast rush to suburbia by 1950s Americans. Rome tackled the problem of understanding the environmental consequences of a national trend – moving out of the cities – by taking a top-down approach, which meshed with his understanding that environmentalism came as much out of government offices as from anywhere else, as the place to combat the ravages of urban sprawl. Sellers tackles the problem of understanding the national trend by taking the two most influential cities in the United States and examining their different paths to the births of a largely shared environmental consciousness. Sellers argues that a range of suburbanites with different backgrounds and goals coalesced into the modern movement, mainly because they wanted to protect the nature that they found in the suburbs, not because the suburbs were the sterile environments that detractors described.

Many of us born in fly-over country are no doubt uneasy about the idea that the Big Apple and the City of Angels tell us much about thinking in Cincinnati or San Antonio, and Sellers acknowledges that by noting that he is also working on a book about environmentalism in Atlanta as well. Still, Sellers demonstrates that New York and Los Angeles were beset by very different problems yet eventually generated environmental responses of similar kinds, namely a suburban culture that celebrated and defended nature in its midst. Rather than being merely mindless consuming automata, people looking to settle in the suburbs often wanted to find nature there, and some ended up fighting vigorously to preserve it. What emerged from the suburbs around these two diverse cities with markedly different landscapes and histories was a movement that mobilized large numbers of people around themes that Sellers calls “postsanitary naturalism” (7), meaning a faith in natural forces instead of the artificial forces that had so often been a part of science-driven sanitation campaigns.

Sellers is careful not to suggest that there was uniform thinking about nature anywhere, but by picking three couples from different locales and ethnic groups in each of the two cityscapes, he argues that different threads of modern environmentalism were formed and then woven together into common causes, such as addressing water pollution on Long Island or air pollution in the LA basin. Big conservationist organizations were late to the party, with the Sierra Club in Los Angeles still arguing about admitting a black member in the early 1960s and the Nature Conservancy (TNC) taking forever to recognize that Long Islanders wanted access to small local places that were hardly the pure nature that TNC had in mind. Environmentalism was really a grassroots movement, and there was more grass in suburbia than anywhere else.

Sellers notes the work of Andrew Hurley, whose Environmental Inequalities brilliantly analyzed the role of environmental politics in Gary, Indiana. In some ways, Crabgrass Crucible echoes Hurley's work by noting the power of the suburb in creating environmentalism and the ways in which the environmental alliances required bridge-building across racial and social divides. Sellers's environmentalists are all suburban dwellers, so they are from various parts of the broad middle class, while Hurley makes the point that less affluent whites and blacks in Gary had their own sets of amenities to protect, and those goals did not always fit together with those of the suburbanites. Ultimately it does not seem possible to square Sellers with Hurley. The environmentalists of Gary's suburbs were looking to acquire and then protect environmental amenities; their alliances with people in the city were fleeting because they prioritized different amenities. In fact, the alliances were easily split by US Steel and other corporate powers because the bonds were so weak. In Hurley's analysis, environmentalism was often a force for inequality, with suburbanites cleaning up their air without being concerned that air pollution was being converted to solid waste that was dumped in poor neighborhoods, while Sellers says bluntly that “suburban environmentalism, at the moment of its making, was itself a movement toward environmental injustice” (7). The motivating force that led to the outpouring of support for Earth Day in 1970 was pollution, which crossed every imaginable societal line and hence mobilized people from all walks of life to environmentalism. Suburbanites led the way, as evidenced by the fact that Earth Day was very much a US proposition, in large part because no other nation had seen suburbanization like the US kind. Sprawl would become a focus later, but sprawl was much more a problem of the haves, not of the have-nots.

Sellers's book is a pleasure to read and a valuable contribution to the debate about the nature of environmentalism. Just for explaining how the suburbs could generate environmental passion rather than squash it, he deserves praise. Environmentalisms in greater New York and Los Angeles are important topics in themselves, and he tells those stories creatively and well. His forthcoming work on Atlanta should further flesh out the story, and so too would studies on other suburbs in the rest of the United States and Canada. It would be especially important to see a comparative study of suburbs around a Canadian and a US city, perhaps Hamilton and Detroit, to figure out what is a product of the process of suburbanization and what might be a product of national policies or other cultural forces.

In a book that is as much cultural and intellectual as environmental history, Aaron Sachs argues that Americans would do well to rediscover the lost idea of Arcadia that nineteenth-century philosophers knew well – that the land could be useful and natural at the same time. Sellers might arch his eyebrow at the suggestion, as it seems obvious that the suburban landscape is filled with nature and about as useful as one could imagine, providing shelter for its residents. Perhaps the garden cemeteries in sizable cities that are central to Sachs's analysis provide shelter that really is superfluous – we do not need landscapes to remember those who have gone before, even if culturally most Americans could not imagine disposing of bodies with anything less than reverence.

Sachs's Arcadian America is an unusual combination of history, memoir, and reflection on the state of modern society. He describes and analyzes in great depth the defenders of the Arcadian vision in the middle of the nineteenth century. Hamlin Garland, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Ignatius Donnelly are among the lesser-known figures who get thorough treatment, as do better-knowns like Thomas Cole and Henry George. Sachs makes the critical point that every debate about expansion, industrialization, and other societal shifts took place in an environmental context that scholars have usually ignored. Positions on each of these points of debate depended in large part on how one envisioned appropriate interaction with nature. It is not clear how we know today who envisioned what: Sachs mentions that the scenic value of the Catskills was generally agreed, but he also argues that the benefits of the local tanneries came to “very few people” (100). Is it possible that those people who agreed that the Catskills ought to be preserved were also willing consumers of the products made possible by the tanneries that defiled their kills and hills? If the consumers of tanned products and the things that could be manufactured only with tanned belts, for instance, did not enjoy the benefits of those products, presumably they would have stopped buying things requiring tanneries.

Proponents of an Arcadian America pushed back at the seemingly unstoppable tide of urban, industrial modernity, wrestling with their own complicity in its advances. Their heyday came in the 1830s and 1840s, when they succeeded in creating the garden cemeteries and early urban parks that would provide relief for all city dwellers, and they found an example of what could be in the region of New York opened to broader commerce by the Erie Canal. Sachs sees the Civil War, leaving human and arboreal stumps across the land, as both a motivator and a breaker of the Arcadian movement, as the proponents were overwhelmed by the power of industrialism. Garland provides the most compelling example of a man who advocated a populist vision of working landscapes, based on his own family's tribulations, while being unable to leave the big cities and the writing jobs that tied him to that modernity which troubled him.

Sachs asserts that modern readers in the United States should study the Arcadians to see if they might provide a way out of current dilemmas that demonstrate that the United States is incapable of balancing nature and economics. The Arcadians, he argues, valued repose, meaning taking time to slow down and reflect, in the face of the headlong rush to industrialize. They approved of “middle landscapes” between untamed nature and the unnatural urban core that was too productive. To make the narrative more real, perhaps, Sachs interweaves through about a third of the book experiences that are often starkly personal, which will either fascinate the reader motivated to know an author's motivation or create a sense of unease that far too much information is being revealed. These stories, which revolve around medical crises of family, friends, and the author, are intended to show the need for repose in our society and the ways in which modern Americans have forgotten the legacy of the Arcadians even as they deal with their cemeteries on a regular basis. Perhaps, Sachs suggests, modernity itself is the disaster and trauma that environmentalists have been worried about for fifty years, prophesying doom. Americans are aware of ecological limits but unwilling to make sacrifices to address them for the future.

Yet a reader might also remember that right across the street from Mt. Auburn Cemetery, which plays a central role in both parts of the book, is Mt. Auburn Hospital. Taking the medical crises in the book as a cue, perhaps it is fair to wonder if it is possible to have an Arcadian America and an America with modern medical facilities. When the cemetery was founded, hospitalizing someone for healing purposes would have been unusual. Indeed, there are places in the world where nineteenth-century medicine still is the best available – witness the ongoing attempts to stop the polio immunization campaigns. How do we square the Arcadian vision with the highly industrial processes that make childbirth much safer than ever and most infections easily combated?

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the lengthy investigations of nineteenth-century intellectuals, John Wills's book US Environmental History: Inviting Disaster, is, like Republic of Nature, a bold attempt to synthesize the sweep of Americans' interactions with nature. Wills reaches back to the earliest European settlement of what is now the United States, discusses such nineteenth-century events as the Battle of the Wilderness and the demise of the bison, and then focuses intensely on post-1945 subjects, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. Wills ties these various points together by using the theme of doomsday, specifically suggesting near the end that the problem for nature in the United States is ultimately technology run amok, particularly in the service of capitalism.

Wills relies on secondary sources, movies, and some primary sources to tell stories that are, in many ways, well known to historians of the United States – it is hard to say much new about the writing of Silent Spring that Linda Lear and Mark Lytle have not already said. Knowledgeable readers will not find new details about the Battle of the Wilderness or Hurricane Katrina. Those sections are still valuable as concise and interesting retellings of stories for readers new to US history, but their main purpose is to set up readers for Wills's argument that Americans have been working on Doomsday for centuries, although more feverishly in the last seventy years. Repeated references to Hollywood provide color, although it is always a challenge to know whether a movie really means anything to a large number of people.

Wills says bluntly that “the United States has been inviting doomsday for quite some time” (3), and he reiterates that point in his conclusion. In between, it is sometimes less clear that he thinks that doomsday is imminent rather than here already. At Jamestown, Americans first “embark on the doomsday project”; after 1945, “Doomsday is clearly manufactured”; in the current century, “doomsday images seem more complicated” (4–5). Is doomsday just a dramatic synonym for “disaster,” or does it literally mean the last day of the world's existence, as we know it? Is Wills telling a story about imagery associated with environmental disaster or about an actual road to an environmental catastrophe along the lines of a full exchange of nuclear weapons? A reader would certainly benefit from a direct discussion of the meaning of “doomsday.” One might infer that doomsday has different timing for different species or groups of people. The passenger pigeon has met its doomsday, and it appears that Wills groups bison and Native Americans as other entities who have met their doom, although the several hundred thousand Native Americans in the US might wonder about that.

Wills clearly thinks that this doomsday track is uniquely American. “The doomsday machine thrived in a specifically American culture of catastrophe,” he concludes, and “Americans came to exhibit a specific pyscho-geography … that feared collapse but also invited it” (214). It is not entirely clear why such doomsday conclusions do not apply to other societies, especially Canada, or even if it would apply to Europe. Surely the early settlers of North America shared worldviews with their fellow Europeans, and the specter of grim battles, catastrophes, and species extinctions, as well as faith in technology and capitalism, have been prevalent in other places around the world. It seems more likely that the Western world, at least, shares a common set of assumptions about nature and a common set of responses through technology. Both Venice and New York are considering floodwalls, and both cities have done their share to contribute to global climate change. Even if the doomsday thinking applies just to Canada, that would make for a very interesting twist; if it does not apply to Canada, then it would be valuable to know when and why the split occurred.

We might also ask what “nature” is. Early in the book, Wills follows Bill McKibben's formula in asserting that “nature actually ended on the eastern seaboard in the early 1600s” (10), a remarkable assertion to anyone who has seen whales in the Gulf of Maine or shorebirds by the thousands on the New Jersey coast. Later, he asserts that early settlers did not have the “technology or numbers to do significant damage” to nature. Of course, an exact definition of “nature” would be contentious, as environmental historians have wrestled with the term for decades, but it would help to know what ended in the 1600s. And was that a doomsday, or just part of an invitation? Does that nature equate with the nature that Sellers finds to be critical to suburbia, or is it compatible with the Arcadian worldview described by Sachs that hardly seemed to be bent on inviting doomsday?

In my adopted hometown, Durham, New Hampshire, one of the most famous battles between natives and exploiters happened in the 1970s, when residents organized to fight off an ill-conceived oil refinery plan backed by Aristotle Onassis. As a birder, I take advantage of the cleaner environment that Durham has because of my forebears, but as a driver I also have asked, “where did the extra refinery capacity go if it didn't come to Durham?” US oil consumption has increased by at least 50 percent since the battle of Durham ended, so our town's victory meant that someone else ended up with the negative consequences of added refinery capacity. While environmental protection is probably not a zero-sum game, it is worth keeping in mind that one person's defended environmental amenity might well be the despoliation of someone else's. NIMBY (not in my backyard) has a flipside, PIIG (put it in Gary, Indiana). In the case of oil refining, there has not been a new refinery built in the United States since 1976, so it is likely that at least some of the refining burden was off-loaded onto people in other countries.

All four of these books might help those of us in Durham understand our history. No doubt the campaigners who fought to save the rural flavor of their neighborhoods from the consequences of an oil refinery would see themselves in Sellers's analysis of suburban environmentalists who found their natural surroundings to be a core part of what they valued. From Wills's book they might raise questions about the nature of environmental catastrophe, particularly in how they shaped their fears of the refinery's consequences. Sachs might compel local readers to rethink how they came to see their town as rural, given that working farms are few and far between; they might also stop to consider how their own lives intersect with the outsourcing of pollution. But Fiege's Republic of Nature would be the most important, for compelling its readers to shake off their assumptions about environmental amenities and environmental forces in their lives. Fiege's book forces readers to think through the ramifications of decisions, which is what the very best history does. I am pleased that there is no refinery in my town, but I wonder who lost so that my Arcadia might be preserved.